EAGER: Drummer Game: A Massive-Interactive Socially-Enabled Strategy Game

该项目的目标是通过开发一款新颖的大型互动游戏来促进不同学科的新研究合作，该游戏代表了一种独特的类型，其中用户团队通过使用物理鼓点作为控制信号来确定战士的行为，战略性地指挥虚拟3D“兵马俑”士兵的军队。这款游戏旨在吸引用户团队和现场观众，让他们在一个引人注目和富有创意的场景中体验合作和竞争的游戏玩法。这项研究的成功完成需要计算科学、艺术和音乐等多个领域的密切合作。该项目的高潮将是一个位于弗吉尼亚理工大学校园中心的社交活动，在这个活动中，完成的游戏将向整个社区公开介绍。为了实现这些目标，PI团队将采用互动游戏设计方法来起草和丰富整体游戏体验。他们将采用商品化的图形处理单元（gpu）来满足实时模拟、动画和大量3D字符渲染的计算挑战。为了提高大规模人群模拟的全局寻径效率，将开发新的数值方法。虚拟士兵的单兵作战行为将由人工智能组件自动调节，该组件由GPU加速的基于agent的仿真支持。为了在巨大的环境中为大量人群提供可视化能力，调查人员将开发技术来实现细节级渲染和动画。为了大规模的互动支持，信号处理和计算机视觉方法将用于识别鼓声并解释观众的参与行为（这将通过嵌入观众成员之间的麦克风和瞄准他们的摄像机进行跟踪）。合成音乐生成方法将被用来产生实时伴奏的鼓。更广泛的影响：上述结果将是工程与艺术之间广泛而深入合作的结果。计算机工程师将设计和开发整个游戏引擎架构、图形渲染技术、角色路径规划的数值解决方案，以及识别鼓点的方法。图形艺术家将为“兵马俑”设计3D几何模型和动画，并将与工程师密切合作，建立一个顺畅的“管道”，将数字内容导入游戏软件系统。现代音乐研究者会根据鼓声的节奏制作伴奏。在这个项目中采用的团队为基础的方法将使学生接触到跨学科的研究，这样他们就能理解和欣赏合作的必要性，以获得有益的和令人兴奋的结果。希望本科生与研究生的团队合作将引导一些本科生选择与研究相关的职业道路，同时也鼓励研究生学习如何更好地指导他人。PI团队希望在项目高潮时的大众媒体活动将使更广泛的公众（尤其是K-12学生）对计算机和艺术充满兴奋。

The goal of this project is to foster new research collaborations across different disciplines by developing a novel massive interaction game that represents a unique genre wherein teams of users strategically direct armies of virtual 3D "terra cotta" soldiers by employing physical drum beats as control signals to determine the warriors' behavior. It is intended that the game will engage and enthrall both user teams and a live audience with the special demands of cooperative and competitive game play in a compelling and creative scenario. Successful completion of the research will require intensive collaboration across multiple fields of computational science, art, and music. The culmination of the project will be a social event centrally located on the Virginia Tech campus, in which the finished game is publically introduced to the community at large.To achieve these goals, the PI team will engage interactive game design approaches to draft and enrich the overall game experience. They will adopt commoditized Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to meet the computational challenges of real-time simulation, animation, and rendering of massive number of 3D characters. Novel numerical methods will be developed to enhance the efficiency of global path finding for massive crowd simulation. The individual combat behavior of the virtual soldiers will be automatically regulated by an artificially intelligent component, which is supported by GPU accelerated agent-based simulation. In order to provide visualization capacity for a massive crowd in an enormous environment, the investigators will develop technologies to enable level-of-detail rendering and animation. For massive interaction support, signal processing and computer vision approaches will be used to recognize the drumbeats and to interpret the audience participation behavior (which will be tracked with the aid of microphones embedded among the members of audience and cameras aimed at them). Synthetic music generation approaches will be utilized to produce real-time accompaniment to the drums.Broader Impacts: The outcome outlined above will be the result of broad and intensive collaboration between engineering and the arts. Computer engineers will design and develop the overall game engine architecture, graphics rendering technologies, numerical solutions for character path planning, and approaches to recognize drum beats. Graphics artists will design 3D geometry models and animations for "terra cotta" soldiers, and will work closely with engineers to build a smooth "pipeline" to import digital content into the game software system. Researchers in modern music will produce accompaniment to the cadence of the drums. The team-based approach adopted in this project will expose students to cross-disciplinary research, so that they come away with an understanding and appreciation of the need to function cooperatively to achieve rewarding and exciting results. Teaming of undergraduate students with graduate students will, it is hoped, lead some of the undergraduates to choose research related career paths while also encouraging the graduate students to learn how to better mentor others. The PI team hopes that the mass media event at the culmination of the project will imbue the broader public (and especially K-12 students) with the excitement of computing and the arts.